Thursday, April 19, 2012

A is for Art 2012 - Sharing with the Aesthetic Department

P wants to sit in aesthetic meeting meeting + SH on MC + agenda not flowery enough = panic button activated by HOD = kenna arrowed to do an hour sharing when i only requested for 10 minutes... >.

Ain and I modified 3 of the activities that we went through during the camp and all the teachers including P had fun doing art and learning about art. In the process, Ain and I had a feel of how would it be like to carry out the activities for people who have no or little art knowledge. We also shared on how these activities can be modified for the teaching of other subjects (as most of our department teachers are not art teachers) and gathered ideas and suggestions on how we could roll out this program to our pupils.

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upon entering the "meeting room", each department member was asked to choose a sticker that was coloured in primary colours...they were curious but Ain and I decided to only reveal the intention during the game... =)

Our tuning activity was the - "blow, wind, blow a colour" game

instead of standing in a circle, we had our participants, 14 of them, placed their chairs in a circle (aka musical chair style)... this was to prevent any dishonest act (oopx)...

while giving the instructions, i found that the concept of secondary colours and exchanging seats can be a little difficult for the participants to grasp so we tried the game out by levels....

If the 'pasan' person calls out a primary colour, for example 'red', then players with the red sticker will have to move to another empty seat and the last person left without a seat will be the next 'pasan' person... and if the person calls out a secondary colour, for example 'green', then players assigned with either one of the 2 primary colours (blue and yellow) that makes up this secondary colour will have to move to another empty seat and the last person left without a seat will be the next 'pasan' person...

for every round, there would be a few people trying to change their positions as they are not allowed to remain in their original seat if their colour is called out. So participants have to be very alert, know their colours well and be quick

during the games, we had participants pulling (gently) ppl out of chairs, some slight shoving and pushing to get to an empty chair and our P's foot was stepped on....oopx.... din know that teachers could be so 'violent' too....wahahahaha.... so rules, especially safety rules were highlighted and I made it a point to remember to lay out the rules before the start of the game when we are playing this game with the pupils.

We shared with the teachers that this game can be used as a tuning in activity or extended to consolidate an art lesson on primary, secondary, warm or cool colours too and it can also be used as a good assessment tool to check on pupils' understanding of the different categories of colours informally.

They could also modify it from 'colours' to 'numbers' and used it in the teaching of factors etc.

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the second activity we tried with the teachers was 'blind drawing'... a volunteer (Joanne, English HOD) was tasked to describe the Quan Am by looking at the picture printed in the Teacher's manual while the rest of the members had to sketch a picture of the Quan Am.

We did not give Joanne the list of guiding questions as planned during the workshop as we were interested to find out if there would be a difference in the outcome. And true enough, even for an adult who is well verse in english, she found it difficult to describe the Quan Am in details or detailed enough for the rest to do a good sketch.

these are some of the teachers' drawings

we had the teachers put up their drawings on the white board to demonstrate what an art wall could be and this led to a discussion to where we could have our art wall...we ended the discussion with P suggesting that it should be in the canteen or the hall where pupils could have access to ...

We also shared with the teachers the theme (textures) behind the 'blind drawing' activity and also the other 3 themes and how the four themes will lead to the final art challenge of making a chair

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the final activity was the drawing of a chair that represented the teachers themselves which too were displayed on the 'temporary' art wall in the room...we were rather impressed with some of the sharing and pictures.... =D

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we prepared the following questions for the teachers and our principal to complete after the sharing

Q1. What did
you learn from the activity? Please elaborate.

Q2. How can
we further improve the way the activity was conducted?

some of the suggestions that we are considering:- get the pupils to colour their stickers for blow, wind, blow a colour- instead of the sticker, use a visual card to display the colour for the blow, wind, blow a colour game- allow pupils to colour their sketches for the sketching a chair activity

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was really glad to have the opportunity (though we din really ask for it) to try out some of the activities with the teachers... it allowed ain and I to have a feel on how the pupils' reaction to the challenges could be... it also allowed us to gather feedbacks and areas of improvement to fine -tuned some of the activities to suit our pupils and our style of facilitation and of cos make the activities more engaging for the pupils ... =)